Of Pool and Treadmills…

Day 29: A Long Day of Suffering

As I’ve written about before Sunday’s are hard days because it requires a lot of effort and a lot of time. This Sunday was no different.

The schedule was tight to begin with: Swim lessons at 8am, Holden’s baseball practice at 2pm, and a playoff tennis match at 7pm. In between all this I needed to get in a 1500 yard swim and a 9 mile run.

I woke early and got to my swim lesson early. I’m really enjoying my weekly lessons but they can be hard. My instructor is more of a coach then an instructor and continually pushes me. This is a good thing, but tiring. There is no leisurely swimming with him. For this lesson we incorporated a number of training aids, such as the pull buoy and hand paddles. The hand paddles were new to me and designed to train your arm entry and pull. If you don’t enter the water at the right angle the paddle is ineffective at best and hurts at worst. The pull buoy works to remove your legs from the swimming equation allowing you to focus completely on your stroke. This is very important for me as my legs are a problem. I kick too much which uses too much energy so figuring out how to control my legs is a focus of nearly every lesson. Once the lesson was over I continued on in the pool to knock out my 1500 yards. Overall I was happy with my progress as I saw my times continue to get better. In this case I came in at 2:18/100 yards.

Immediately after the swim I changed into running gear and jumped on the treadmill. This is considered a “brick” workout which wasn’t actually called for in The Plan but was a necessity given my schedule. I ended up doing a 7 mile run instead 9 miles. Largely this was because the treadmills have a time limit of 60 minutes (65 minutes if you include the cooldown period). Additionally I used Zwift again for the run and hadn’t yet configured it for runs longer than 7 miles. Regardless, I felt good. No knee pain and I maintained a good, albeit slower, pace. I’m actually looking forward to this week’s long run of 10 miles as a good test.

The biggest issue for me on this particular Sunday was that after my workouts I was EXHAUSTED. As in it was hard to not just lay on the couch all day. It wasn’t that my muscles hurt, it was just that my body didn’t want to move. To me this was a sign that my nutrition was off and needed more attention. I consulted with my informal coach on Monday and believe I have a better nutrition plan. Mainly this involves consuming more protein before my workouts and more carbohydrates immediately after working out. My muscles are not getting enough fuel and are therefore are not recovery fast enough. Hopefully my adjustments will yield quick results.